Chad Hurley, one of the three founders of YouTube.
YouTube Inc. was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim in February 2005 in San Bruno, California. They met when they worked at PayPal, Chen and Karim as engineers, as a designer and Chad. According to Hurley and Chen, the idea emerged YouTube before the difficulties experienced in trying to share videos taken during a party at San Francisco. This story has been considered a very simplified version, and Chen has recognized that this idea may have been promoted by the need to present a simple story to the market. Karim has said that the event never happened, and that the idea of sharing videos on the Internet was his. His colleagues have said that if the event occurred and that Karim’s original idea was to create a dating site where people could qualify based on their videos. Karim admits having been influenced by a dating site called HotorNot.com (Is Sexy or not ‘), where users could upload photos theirs, which were then rated by other users.
This domain was activated February 15, 2005, and April 23 was the first video uploaded, Me at the Zoo (I at the zoo). In the spring entro YouTube online, however, developers quickly realized that all users to upload videos, leaving behind the original idea. Traffic was shot when people started to put YouTube links in their MySpace page. The rapid growth of the site attracted Time Warner and Sequoia Capital, to invest in it. After that in October 2005, the company placed a Nike propaganda starring Ronaldinho, large companies began to be attracted by YouTube. Only in 2005, Sequoia had to invest 8.5 billion U.S. dollars on the site.
Original headquarters of YouTube (2 piso).
By December 2005, the pages were viewed on YouTube about 50 million times a day. However, after the music video Lazy Sunday, originally broadcast on the show Saturday Night Live, was uploaded to YouTube, the visits were fired again to reach 250 million views a day. In May 2006, According to Alexa.com, YouTube reached two billion by days of displays, and by mid-August had reached seven billion mark on several occasions, also had become the tenth most visited site in United States . At that time, the New York Post think that YouTube should enforce between 600 million and one billion U.S. dollars. MySpace.com and Google launched their own versions of YouTube, without success.
By October 2006, YouTube remained offices in San Mateo, located on the second floor of a building, and had about 60 employees. An executive of Universal Music Group announced recently that YouTube was to them “tens of millions of dollars” for infringement of copyright. Mark Cuban, co-founder of Broadcast.com, an Internet radio service purchased by Yahoo in 1999, had stated a month earlier than just a “silly” would buy YouTube for potential legal problems that face. However, site owners were already committed with Warner Music to improve service, so that could quickly detect when a video of your property was uploaded to the site. However, earlier this month published a report in the Wall Street Journal indicating that Google was buying YouTube for a thousand six hundred million dollars. This information was initially denied by YouTube and Google, which ranked as the rumors.
YouTube offices in San Bruno, California, after its purchase by Google.
That same month, Google bought YouTube for U.S. 1,650 million shares. At the time of purchase 100 million videos on YouTube were displayed, and 65 thousand new videos daily was added. In addition, some 72 million people visited per month. Hurley and Chen took office, like the 67 employees at that time worked in the company. In the earlier days, YouTube has signed two agreements with Universal Music Group and CBS, and Google has signed agreements with Sony BMG and Warner Music to distribute music videos.
By June 2008, 38 of videos viewed on YouTube came from the Internet, the nearest competitor reaching just represent 4 . Although Google does not reveal the figures, it is estimated that the site generates 200 million dollars this year. In that month, an announcement on the homepage of YouTube costing 175 thousand dollars a day, and the customer had to spend 50 thousand dollars on ads in Google or YouTube pages.